State Department tried to keep Clinton emails from being market as classified

DevlinBarrett

A State Department official in 2015 tried to keep the Federal Bureau of Investigation from marking a Hillary Clinton email as classified, according to documents that reveal the extent to which officials sought to reduce the number of messages judged to contain national secrets.

The move by the State Department, which came after questions were raised about Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, focused on a single email about the probe into the 2012 attacks on U.S. outposts in Benghazi, Libya. The newly released summaries of FBI interviews show one State official pressed the FBI not to mark one message classified, and that senior State officials exerted similar pressure within their own agency as it studied the Clinton emails.

Each email judged to be classified, even more than two years after Clinton left the State Department, represented another potential mark against not just the State Department, but also Clinton’s claims she did nothing wrong and didn’t compromise national secrets.

The FBI announced in July, after an investigation, that while it had found “extremely careless” conduct in Mrs. Clinton’s email use, evidence didn’t merit filing criminal charges.

Clinton, now the Democratic presidential nominee, has said her use of a private server was a mistake, and her aides have argued the email scandal was fueled by government officials aggressively overclassifying documents retroactively. Some Republicans have called for her to be further investigated.

Intraday Data provided by SIX Financial Information and subject to terms of use. Historical and current end-of-day data provided by SIX Financial Information. All quotes are in local exchange time. Real-time last sale data for U.S. stock quotes reflect trades reported through Nasdaq only. Intraday data delayed at least 15 minutes or per exchange requirements.